Made some progress. Picked up a cheap msi video card from microcenter.. gt710 based.
Initially had esxi 6.7 installed. Got it to the point of initializing the hdmi video but still had issues passing the usb BT dongle. Decided to revert back to 6.5.
Installed 6.5 from scratch (actual windows vm is on a seperate ssd drive). Had to blast away the original vmx. Created a new one but rather than making a new hd, pointed it to the vmdk from before.
Now, the secret sauce. Adding the hypervisor.cpuid.v0 got me as far as initializing dvi output of the card but not hdmi.
In my search I came across this,
TR-1950X + GTX 1060 Passthrough with ESXi : Amd , which references a
/etc/vmware/passthru.map file.
In it I added the following lines at the bottom then rebooted the esxi host.
10de 128b d3d0 false
10de 0e0f d3d0 false
The first 2 sets of numbers come from the
lspci -n output. These reference the video card and hd audio component of it.
0000:01:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:128b
0000:01:00.1 Class 0403: 10de:0e0f
The 2nd number (128b, 0e0f) are the device id's and will be
unique for your particular card.
The 3rd number (d3d0) is a reset method. I have no idea what it actually refers to, but it works! This got rid of error code 43. Error 43 resulted once I set svga.present to false.
I don't have a pcie usb card. In fact, once I'm done testing, box this is going to only has 2 pcie slots. One will hold the video card, other quad port nic. Unless I can somehow force a HID device through, i'm stuck using BT (or something else).
Edit: It should be noted, onboard intel video was disabled in the bios. Re-enabling and selecting as initial init bring backs error code 43. Ideally it'd be nice to retain it so access to esxi recovery is possible. Not a complete deal breaker. One can always go into the bios to re-enable, fix esxi, then change over to pcie init.
Edit 2: No go with onboard video enabled in any capacity. Even when initial video is set to pcie, still error 43. So onboard video has to be disabled.